It’s a lock-out (1979)

From the November 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Suddenly, the cry “All out, brothers” threatens to take on a new meaning, becoming not the command of the shop steward but the frustrated wail of the locked out worker, pressing round the unyielding factory gate.

For over a year now, workers in The Times newspapers have been locked out —and there are reports that, rather than face another twelve months of negotiations, the Thompson Organisation will close the papers down permanently. In case anyone has forgotten, this dispute began over the workers’ resistance to new methods of compositing, with likely redundancies. During the recent two day strikes in the engineering industry, the companies who are members of the Engineering Employers’ Federation retaliated by laying off workers and locking out others—notably at Rolls Royce. An article in the Observer (23.9.79) by Robert Taylor gave the substance of some guide lines issued by the EEF:

“Industrial action, such as go-slows, refusal to work normally and blacking of employees, products or machines should not he tolerated for more than a few days. After warning, with a sufficient period allowed for reflection, suspension without pay should be the normal response.”

This attempt at the sort of solidarity more usually expected from trade unionists —which employers, because of the essentially competitive nature of capitalism, will find rather more difficult—was illuminating. When factories stop because of a strike, we are subjected to a barrage of clap-trap from the press about, disruptive workers preventing the production of essential goods needed by pensioners, sick children . . But when the employers, also in the act of protecting their interests in the class struggle, bring production to a halt there is not a word of protest; withers in Fleet Street remain unwrung over jeopardised export markets, frustrated customers, deprived consumers and so on.

Agriculture

Perhaps the press will need a little time to catch on. The relative prosperity of British capitalism for some twenty years after the war outmoded lock-out; it was usually better to pay up on a wage claim than to shut the firm down. But it was not always so.

In the earlier days of British capitalism, before the unions were strong enough to offer effective resistance, the lock-out was often wielded to beat down living standards. In the 1830s it was used against the attempts to form an Operative Builders’ Union: the employers won, as the lock-out forced the OBU into deep financial trouble. In 1897 the Amalgamated Society of Engineers struck for an eight hour day, after a prolonged wrangle over the introduction of new machinery. The employers retaliated, with the first national lock-out ever. After six months the ASE was crushed and the employers, proclaiming themselves “masters in our own shops”, dictated the terms of the surrender.

There was a similar’ bitter story in agriculture, where workers were trying to live on appallingly low wages. In 1872, in Warwickshire, 200 farm labourers struck for a rise to 16s (80p) a week for their eleven hour day. Their case was such as to attract some support from the press (although not, presumably, in Church Times; the Bishop of Gloucester advocated throwing the strikers into the village pond). It was a bitter fight, which spread as the farmers imposed a general lock-out. At Chipping Norton, two magistrates who were also clergymen did their duty by both god and Mammon by sentencing sixteen women, some still suckling their babies, to hard labour for “intimidating” blacklegs. The strikers were defeated, partly by the effects of the agricultural depression of the 1870s, which helped to cripple their union.

Coal Mines

The Webbs described this type of dispute as the “.. . insurrection of the village and the autocratic spirit which it aroused in the owners of land and tithe. . . ” an attitude which lingered, even in more modern industry, almost as if the employers saw some advantage in behaving like feudal barons.

Before the First World War, there were about 1,500 separate companies owning the coal mines in Britain. In many cases, the company was personified by one rich, influential owner—Lord Londonderry, Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, Lord Rhondda, Evan Williams. Some of these companies were more “liberal” and “enlightened” than others — and some more efficient and profitable—and the mines were a traditional battlefield over wages and conditions, marked like shell-holes by strikes and lock-outs. The miners were bonny, experienced fighters and among the higher paid workers in Britain.

As part of British capitalism’s war effort, the mines were taken effectively under state control in 1917. After the war, there was a brief, hectic boom for the British coal industry as it filled the gaps left by the devastated French mines and the immobilised German pits. This did not last long and the British export markets in Europe and South America abruptly contracted. Coal had been the basis of the power of Victorian capitalism; now it symbolised that power’s decline. By 1921 the losses of the mines were growing beyond the scope of government subsidies and in April that year, with a wage claim pending, the industry was abruptly passed back to the private owners.

Far from being about to negotiate a rise in wages, the private owners were proposing a reduction of over £2 a week. Flexing their muscles as they took over the pits again, they posted lock-out notices. The miners expected support from the railwaymen and the transport workers and when this did not happen the episode became notorious as “Black Friday”. The struggle went on for three months, until the miners were forced back to work on terms worse than they might have hoped to get originally.

Newspapers

More recent times have seen little use of the lock-out in Britain although, according to Robert Taylor, in France and Germany it is more common than the strike. But now, with the employers struggling from the desperation of a prolonged recession, may be the time for its revival. Writing in the Sunday Telegraph (23.9.79) Peregrine Worsthorne gloated over the engineering workers:

“Last year an engineering strike might have shown the workers to be invincible. So may one next year. But the same could be said about any momentous historical miscalculation — even the Charge of the Light Brigade.”

Of course Worsthorne, like all the conventional observers of capitalism, is seeing things very much in the immediate, superficial sense. Every dispute has its immediate causes and how it is fought out—and who wins—must depend on the conditions prevailing at the time. Strikes have a better chance of succeeding in a boom and by the same token a lock-out is more likely when there is a slump. This was the case with the farm labourers and the engineering workers in the 19th century and with the miners in 1921. And it is so today.

The Times shut down was an episode in a long decline in the newspaper industry, in which many papers perished and the profits of the survivors have been under strong pressure. The malaise is widespread; the September report of the Confederation of British Industry showed how the rest of the employers view their prospects. They expect their profitability for 1979 and 1980 to fall below the previous poor levels of 1974-5.

Behind such immediate prospects, and behind the temporary changes in balances of strength, lies the basic, inescapable fact ‘of the class struggle. This struggle continues without pause — often without its participants realising that they are involved in it.

Firstly, the struggle is about the division of wealth in capitalist society and this is where the unions and the employers’ federations operate. There are still a few strange people who doubt the need for the struggle, who doubt that wealth is divided so that some people have vastly more of it than others.

Poverty

Reality is against them. For a long time a mass of evidence has been accumulated, using different methods—income tax returns, estate duties, social surveys—measuring the extent of this inequality. Sir Joshua Stamp, in 1919, estimated that one per cent of the population owned over 65 per cent of the national wealth. Nearly sixty years later Louie Burghes found that one per cent owned 31 per cent of the wealth and the top 10 per cent owned 70 per cent. An article by Anthony Giddens in New Society (4.10.79) estimated that the top five per cent of “the rich” own 98 per cent of the total of privately held corporate stocks and shares. At the other end of the scale the Low Pay Unit reports that at the end of 1977 one family in eight was living at or below the supplementary benefits line, which itself is little better than starvation. The figures, along with the methods of collecting them, may vary from time to time. But the fact of inequality—and of the existence of riches alongside poverty—remains.

This brings us to the wider, more fundamental, aspect of the class struggle. In this case we are not discussing a struggle participated in by thousands of trade unionists, which gets the big headlines and has union leaders hurrying to and from Downing Street. We are talking about the ultimate, about the struggle over who owns the means of production and about establishing a new society of common ownership and free access to wealth.

For the present this struggle is the work of a minority, of a few who are aware of what capitalism is and of how it operates. This conscious few know that industrial disputes are not moral issues; they know that workers who strike, and employers who lock out, are simply acting in accordance with their interests in the class struggle. They are expressing the fact that capitalism does not produce its wealth for the benefit of its people, that capitalism is a society of disharmony.

And capitalism continues only because the rest— the unconscious majority—want it to. This was the symbolic quality about those pictures of the engineering workers hammering on the factory gates. The limit of their ambition is another style of exploitation. They are, brothers and sisters, on their way to nowhere.

Ivan

War and Religion. By “The Times”. (1914)

From the November 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The Times” (4.10.14), lifting itself above the mere economic advantages we are supposed to gain by the war, endeavoured to prove spiritual gains as well. “No feature of the war has been more striking than the religious feeling it has evoked,” they said. War, which increases the uncertainty of life, has so unsettled the minds of the workers that their doubts and fears of the future have intensified. Without a philosophy based on science man becomes an easy prey to priestly ties. Regarding his own physical anatomy as something amazingly wonderful, and far beyond his poor understanding, he is easily persuaded that he has a soul that transcends even his physical possessions ; and the eternal existence of that soul in peace or torment depends upon his conduct while crawling about the earth in subjection to those who have taken possession of it.

Life is the only state that human beings can know, because it is only in life we possess consciousness and can know anything at all. The scientific mind accepts nothing without evidence, and neither science, religion, or philosophy has yet produced one shred of evidence to prove even the likelihood or possibility of consciousness, spirit, or any other known or unknown force existing apart from the substance or matter to which it belongs.

Scientists—in the laboratory—are practically agreed that the Cosmos is Matter in Motion, and nebulae, constellations, systems, geological and biological periods, and even the existence of different substances, are but changing manifestations of Matter in Motion. “Every living creature,” said a recent president of the “International Science Association,” “is, after all, merely a chemical mechanism,” and anyone that has read an intelligible work on physiology, explaining the functions and interdependence of organs, can appreciate that statement. An acquaintance with evolution, showing how both organs and functions have developed simultaneously, is sufficient evidence of its truth for anyone whose income is not affected. Consciousness or thought is the function of the brain, just as digestion is the function of the stomach. Digestion is impossible without digestive organs and food—though the wage-slave is often forced to try the experiment without the latter. Neither can consciousness exist without nerve ganglia, or brain and so nothing external to be conscious of. Science thus establishes the oneness or Monism of the Cosmos—but only for the cultured ruling class of society: the ignorant superstitions of the dark ages, slightly modified, are good enough for the workers.

In the supreme anarchy of a capitalist war events seem more than ever to be the result of chance, and gods, mascots, and oracles are brought out, dusted, and worshipped; and “The Times,” with characteristic hypocrisy and satisfaction, remarks that the “War has evoked religious feeling.”

“Nothing in man is more real than the instinct that urges him to sacrifice himself for an ideal which to him is dearer than life itself,” says “The Times.” We pass over the obvious error that, there can be any sacrifice where something dearer than what is given is the objective, and the equally obvious admission that man does not always act according to intelligence—even in important matters—but proves himself allied to the rest of the animal world by virtue of the fact that he still acts from instinct—when intelligence fails him.

Bat is it not characteristic of capitalist hypocrisy that the actions of their dupes should bs attributed to instincts and ideals, when it is common knowledge that necessity has compelled the vast majority to enlist. True, they sing and laugh as they march, but that does not prove that they have acted with either freedom or intelligence. It proves only that they have caught the war fever and are incapable, for the time being, of understanding or realising the actual situation—so aptly described and forcibly denounced by Israel Zangwill: “That they are food for powder, so coarse in texture ; carcasses so gross and sub-human, that their best use is to be thrown to the guns—a providential fire screen for the finer classes.”

The business of the ink-slinger to-day is to manufacture high-sounding phrases that appear to be loaded with importance, yet when analysed mean little or nothing. “War is a supreme test of reality,” says “The Times.” All the nations bluff, but only the contact of forces determines which is really the strongest—just as the opponents of Socialism can always destroy it any where but in debate. If there is sense in the statement, then the following from the same source obviously contradicts it. “Faith in force is a poor substitute for faith in right. Force is a sorry god” ; and the sentences that immediately follow are a reversion to the original statement that it is force that rules: “For, when a stronger strength arises to shatter it, nought but despair and doubt remain.”

But twice is not sufficient for “The Times” to contradict itself, so it throws over the first and third position and once more takes up the second: “When as we are firmly persuaded, the Allied Armies shall have overthrown the German’s divinity, the German people itself may learn the futility of trust ‘in reeking tube and iron shard,’ and turn again to the higher trust which their greatest teachers have inculcated upon them and upon the world.”

Next “The Times” says: “Faith and the spirit of sacrifice are the essence of religion, just as scepticism and selfishness are its negation.” The above definition of religion we might dispute, were it not that the word “essence” is not so clearly defined in capitalist politics and philosophy as in chemistry. The essential belief, and therefore the essence of religion, is belief in the supernatural. A code of morals, even including the “spirit of sacrifice,” without such a belief cannot be called a religion, no matter who imposes it. But this “spirit of sacrifice,” is undoubtedly a tenet of the Christian dogma, and eminently suits it for the capitalist system.

First let us see what is its actual meaning. To labour for others ; to risk life, or even to die, for others. Under this heading comes the whole of the working class. They live in poverty while they produce fabulous wealth for an idle class. They risk their lives daily and die in thousands for them on the field of battle. What we see then, is that the “essence of religion” so-called is really the purpose or object. So long as religion induces millions of workers to continue their life long sacrifice, the capitalist will generously permit them to think of themselves as sheep bled on the altar of civilisation, i.e. , capitalist idleness and luxury.

But what of the other side: “Scepticism and selfishness are its negation.” Every shareholders’ meeting, of every concern, at home or abroad, is evidence of capitalist greed. One eighth of the population takes two-thirds of the national wealth, and leaves one-third for the other seven-eighths. Avarice has been the watch word of the commercial class since the break-up of the guilds. How to get more out of their wage-slaves while reducing their rations has been, and is still, their most engrossing problem. Vultures snarling over raw flesh are less repulsive than capitalist governments quarrelling over markets and using the working class—after exploiting them—as “a providential fire screen.”

So much for their selfishness. It is unnecessary to marshall evidence to prove their scepticism, they show their contempt for the promises of future happiness and threats of punishment every day of their lives. They have no use for a religion that instructs them to “sell all they have and give unto the poor” ; nor do they care a tinker’s anathema for a “place on high,” if it is to be obtained by sacrificing a “place in the sun” here below. The capitalist has no “faith” in another life, and the “spirit of sacrifice” is not “business.” He is the embodiment of the ” negation of religion,” “scepticism and selfishness.”

“War,” concludes “The Times,” “with all its horrors and suffering, has at least this bright side. It lifts mankind out of its daily self, and suffuses the drab life of the multitude with a spiritual glow. In such an atmosphere the still voice of the divine spirit of the universe may be clearly heard, despite the clamour and clash of arms.” The colour has changed from drab to crimson. Poverty has intensified, and the murders committed annually on the industrial field, for profits, are being augmented by thousands daily ; yet mankind has gained something, ” a spiritual glow”—searchlights. But what does the “still voice” say ?—we are not told. Possibly the black-coated hypocrites are waiting for their orders from the representatives of that class in whose interests they teach and write such lies and rubbish for the confusion of the workers.

F. Foan

A lesson in capitalist ethics. (1908)

From the April 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

"The fact brutally resolves itself to this. Society ultimately depends on force. Happily force is not constantly employed, but, until the world becomes very different from what it is, it must always be latent."—The Times, Feb. 29, 1908.

The Passing Show: I hire 'em, I fire’em (1956)

The Passing Show Column from the April 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

I hire 'em, I fire’em

Under the 1948 treaty of “alliance” between Britain and Jordan, Britain is allowed to maintain air bases and troops in Jordan, and subsidises and trains the Arab Legion, which is the Jordan army and police force combined. The subsidy to the Arab Legion is paid not to the Jordan Government but direct to the Legion itself. Up to a short time ago the Arab Legion was commanded and controlled by Brigadier-General Glubb, who had the assistance of more than 70 British officers, some seconded from the British Army, but most on private contract with the Jordan Government. Under this set-up General Glubb “controlled a sum which amounted last year to two-thirds of Jordan’s total national budget” (The Observer, 4/ 3/56). When it was pointed out that this meant that Jordan, with her coercive forces controlled—through Glubb and the British subsidy—by Britain, was little more than a British colony, the answer always came pat that Glubb had nothing to do with Britain; he was simply a “soldier of fortune,” who was employed as a matter of private arrangement by King Hussein and the Jordan Government But when, on 1st March, King Hussein acted on this assumption, and gave Glubb the sack, what a roar of anger went up from the British ruling class! In fact, under the old arrangement, Jordan was a quasi-colony of Britain; and the dismissal of Glubb was part of an attempt by the Jordanian ruling class to free itself from the tutelage of the British ruling class.

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For better, for worse

But while the British ruling class was roaring with anger, our “progressives,” our left-wing Labourites and Communists, were roaring with approval. The sacking of Glubb was seen as a successful episode in an anti-colonial struggle for liberation by the Jordan people instead of indicating merely a change of masters. But how progressive is it to be a “progressive?” For while the Arab Legion was controlled by Britain, Glubb saw to it that it was kept ready to defend the interests, strategic and commercial, of the British ruling class in the Middle East, in any possible struggle with anti-British powers. It was therefore the policy of Britain to keep the Legion out of any war with Israel. But now that the restraining influence of General Glubb has been removed, the chances of a war between Israel and Jordan, with all the attendant devastation and misery, have been much increased. As usual, the “progressives” in their pursuit of “immediate” policies and “day-to-day” objectives, have found themselves between the devil and the deep blue sea.

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The things that are sacred

The House of Commons has now voted twice within a month to end hanging. An interesting sidelight on the first debate in 'February was the attitude of The Times. It was against the complete abolition which Mr. Silverman and his associates called for; and although it prides itself that its news columns are impartial, it saw fit (taking the report of the debate and the summary on the main news page together) to give 90 inches of space to the speeches of the hangman’s supporters against only 30 inches to those of the abolitionists.

As for the second debate, in March, one cannot resist quoting part of the contribution made by Mr. Logan, the Labourite, who sits for the Scotland Division of Liverpool (The Times, 17/2/56).

“The Bill was the most fallacious and damnable thing affecting the liberty of the people that had been brought before the House of Commons. It gave a licence to kill without a penalty. It should not be allowed.... If members of the House valued their own lives, if they valued law and order, and if they wanted to protect the things that were sacred, in the name of God it was their duty to vote against the second reading.”

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Camel-swallowers, Inc.

But in spite of the impassioned arguments of Mr. Logan, the Bill was given a second reading. What is the Socialist attitude to it? It means that some 12 or 13 persons each year will, instead of bring hanged, be put into prison for a greater or lesser number of years. But in the meantime the system of Capitalism, with its big wars, “small” wars, colonial wars, and “emergencies,” continues to send thousands to their deaths every year. Mr. Silverman, the Labour M.P. for Nelson and Colne, said in the first debate (The Times, 17/2/56):

“Beyond all the arguments about deterrents and the state of the law, there must remain in their minds the fear that from time to time at eight or nine o’clock in the morning an innocent man would be taken out of his cell to have his neck broken.”

But Mr. Silverman, and the other Parliamentary supporters of the Bill. were also supporters of the last war, when not one or two innocent men, but hundreds of thousands of innocent men—and women and children too —were shot or bombed to pieces. If Mr. Silverman is really concerned with preventing innocent people losing their lives, he would be wise to devote himself to the inauguration of Socialism, instead of the patching-up of Capitalism.

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Fiddling the accounts

Figures are frequently published to demonstrate to the workers that the rate of surplus value is really very low. For this purpose various shady devices are employed —for example, allowing for directors’ fees, which are often a disguised form of surplus value, as part of the total expenditure along with wages and raw materials, before calculating the amount of profit which the workers have produced for their bosses. Another, and more important, dodge is to allow for payment of the various company taxes before reckoning up the surplus value. And it is true that if this is done, the amount of surplus value is brought down considerably. But this is simply a trick. To the worker, labouring part of the week to produce the equivalent of his wages' and for the rest of the week to produce surplus value for his boss, it is immaterial whether that part of the value of his work which is stolen from him goes to the individual Capitalist who happens to employ him or to the executive committee of the Capitalist class, which is the State. The Capitalist grumbles about his taxes, but he goes on paying them, because the burden of taxation can only be borne by a propertied class. The State must foot heavy bills for things like armaments. And for these the Capitalists must pay. But they pay for what they want themselves armaments are not bought in the interest of the working class; they are bought to enable the ruling class—that is the Capitalist class—to defend its property and its profits against the ruling class of other states. But though the Capitalists have to sacrifice part of their gains to preserve the rest, all of it—what they buy armaments with and what they keep—is surplus value, which the worker produces and is then deprived of.


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Boloney, Mr. Masefield

On February 17th the Queen returned from a tour of Nigeria. To mark the event Mr. John Masefield, the Poet Laureate, composed the following verse:

Lines for the Home-Coming of our Most


              Gracious Sovereign Lady


Chain upon chain, and prison within prison,

Man shuts his spirit into deeper night.

This Lady, home-returning, has brought light.

Upon a way long dark a star has risen.

Do you really think it has, Mr. Masefield?

It is sad to see a man of Mr. Masefield's talents reduced to writing rubbish because the upper class expects it of him.

Alwyn Edgar

50 Years Ago: We have heard it all before (1967)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fifty years ago The Times published articles urging the adoption of a five point "New Industrial Charter“ as a means of securing industrial peace, increased production and increased profit.

“Prevention of Unemployment”

“The government shall undertake to prevent the occurrence of unemployment in the same sense that it prevents the occurrence of cholera”.

“This can be done, as soon as the government chooses, by nothing more recondite than a systematic rearrangement of the necessary works and orders of the government departments and local authorities over each decade as will maintain approximately level from year to year ... the aggregate wage-total of the kingdom”.

“The Maintenance of Standard Rates” 

“The standard rate, it must be remembered is never anything but a minimum. No employer is prevented from paying more and. in fact, there are always some who do pay more, whilst no workmen is prevented from asking for more”.

“A Constitution for Factory and Industry”

“The third clause of the Charter . . . suggests details of a Constitution ranging from the appointment of a Shop Steward, to a National Council for the whole Industry, the latter body to consider . . . such matters as Technical Training and Apprenticeship and Publicity”.

“No Limitation of Output”

“What is most vital to National efficiency, as it is to the employers' hope of profit, is to get rid fully and permanently, of the workmen’s tendency silently to restrict his output . . ”

“Freedom for Every Worker”

“Once unemployment is prevented, and an effective guarantee for the maintenance of the standard rate is conceded . . . The government may fairly ask from the trade unions complete freedom for the employer for engaging any person whatever, for any sort of work; complete freedom for any person to do any task or carry out any process; and complete freedom for the introduction of any machinery or process”. 

From the Socialist Standard, May 1917.

Charity Begins . . . and Never Ends (1975)

From the April 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are thousands of organizations concerned with picking up the pieces of the multitude of wrecks that capitalism creates. The Charity Commissioners who keep the register of official charities have an ever-increasing list of organizations. And you can be sure that each charity has a cause which is the most pressing and the most heartrending.

Now you would imagine that those who form and run charitable organizations think they are doing something useful. You would also assume that their aim was to deal with one particular dark corner of the social scene chosen as their speciality (at the expense of everything else of course), eradicate the problem and then quietly close. But not a bit. Charities that were formed years ago are still going and see no prospect of being able to cease operations.

Take the Salvation Army as an example. There you can see boundless energy and effort being lost in the quagmire of working-class misery. Capitalism gives the workers their daily deprivation. And along comes the Sally and says it is really all for the best and there is pie in the sky when you die. You can’t deny they do a lot of work. Last year they provided 8,001,323 meals and 1,646,578 beds for the homeless. Plenty of other things too, like visiting prisoners, tracing “missing persons” etc. There’s energy for you. (When you consider that there are hundreds of organizations doing basically similar work to the Sally, though not necessarily with the same insidious brand of propaganda, you realize the size of the problem).

You would think with that effort flying around something would be happening. An end to the Sally in sight perhaps? I am afraid not. In their latest appeal for funds they quote the following extract from the Daily Mirror (19th February 1974).

In 1890 General Booth estimated that a tenth of Britain’s population was imprisoned by squalid want. Today the army puts the figure at TWO-TENTHS . . . But if the poor are always with us then so too, fortunately are organizations like the “Sally Army" . . . (their emphasis).

So not only are they still here, they always will be whilst capitalism continues. The Daily Mirror points out that things are getting worse. So Capitalism creates more Silly Armies (with modern sounding titles like “Shelter” and “Oxfam”) to tackle problems that grow more intractable every day.

But why rely on the Sally to be told that things are getting worse and that by implication prop-up boys like the Sally are useless? Read The Times editorials:

it would be wrong to suppose that we could build ourselves out of our difficulties even if society allocated far greater resources to building than there is any prospect of. Homelessness also increased in the years when the construction figures were comparatively good . . . The number of families applying to local authorities for temporary accommodation has steadily increased from 18.000 in 1968 to 32,000 in 1973.

(19th February 1975)

Having said that capitalism can’t produce homes for the homeless The Times goes on to knock private landlords (apologists for capitalism love to find scapegoats, and the goats that write for The Times are no exception). The article then says that “the private sector”

did satisfy a demand for cheap housing of indifferent quality and for short term rapidly available accommodation of a kind that will always be needed by mobile workers and young families who do not yet qualify for a council house or a mortgage. (Our emphasis).

In other words, not only homelessness but shoddy housing (with all its attendant problems) and the need for operations like the Sally will continue. Not homelessness for all, mind you. The same issue of The Times has a letter from the Duke of Rutland whose problem is the upkeep of two castles in which he lives (not at the same time, one presumes). No charities have to provide him with a free meal or a hammock. But for the majority, the working class, the need for charities continues. And the more charities there are to mop up the squalor flowing out of capitalism, the more the flood of poverty spreads over the ground.

Like all charities, the Salvation Army only concerns itself with the result and not the cause of social problems. Capitalism will never provide adequate housing for the workers as The Times admits. If people wish to solve these problems, they must look beyond the present system of society. To all you working people who support and run charities, we have this question: why not learn to run Socialism instead?

Ronnie Warrington

Murdoch at The Times (1981)

From the March 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is a fact of life under capitalism that the capitalist invests only where there is a prospect of making profit. As Marx put it, from the capitalist standpoint a worker who does not yield a profit to his employer is not a productive worker. Newspapers are no exception; when they continue to show losses, they are closed down. The London Evening News is only the latest of a large number that have disappeared in recent years.

There is, however, a widespread belief that The Times is different. Because it has been in existence since 1785, was for a long time a government mouthpiece, and has a certain reputation for reliability and avoidance of sensationalism, the claim is made that it is a “natural asset" which must be preserved at all costs. The belief has been supported by the fact that at times wealthy newspaper proprietors like Lord Northcliffe and the late Lord Thomson have been prepared to own it for prestige reasons and lose a certain amount of money. So when the present Lord Thomson announced that unless he found a buyer for The Times, the Times Literary Supplement and two educational supplements, he would close them down, the media reported that the nation was stunned and it had to be debated in the House of Commons.

Adulation of The Times is not however shared by some of the rival newspapers. Reporting the House of Commons debate, Andrew Alexander (Daily Mail, 28 July) took a distinctly critical attitude:

MPs on both sides spoke of The Times and the Sunday Times, especially the former, with a mixture of awe, reverence and admiration. Those newspapers play a really tremendous part in British public life, MPs kept stressing until one was finally left wondering how it was that “public life" did not grind to a halt altogether during the eleven months that the two papers were off the street. Actually, of course, MPs were discussing a couple of newspapers of modest distinction, as prone to vulgar error, inaccuracies and unconvincing arguments as much of the rest of Fleet Street, except that when The Times, for example, talks twaddle it does so in polysyllables and charges you 20p for the privilege of reading sophisticated nonsense (as opposed to unsophisticated nonsense available elsewhere for less)!

As was inevitable in the long run, the future of the Times group of publications is being decided on the question of profitability. The Thomson company is reported to have lost £50 million through the eleven months’ strike. It is not that the company could not afford to go on running the newspapers at a loss, but the shareholders have no intention of seeing their profits from oil thrown away on this loss-making branch of their activities.

When publication was resumed it was the expectation, on the employers’ side, that the unions would agree to the introduction of new technology and reductions of staff, which would turn losses into profits. The unions had still not agreed when another strike took place, this time by the journalists. Lord Thomson then announced his deadline; failing the receipt of a satisfactory offer for the whole group (or for the separate journals), together with agreement by the unions to accept big changes, all the journals would cease publication in March.

The Thomson company provisionally accepted an offer by Rupert Murdoch, who owns Australian newspapers as well as the Sun and the News of the World. Objection was raised to this on the ground that it would create an unacceptable monopoly but the government refused to refer it to the Monopolies Commission.

Two other objections were raised regarding Murdoch; that he would not allow his editors independence in matters of policy, and that under his ownership The Times would never be the same again. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Observer and Telegraph) was horrified:

With Murdoch at The Times, the whole ecology of Fleet Street is changed, for the worse. The master of the most disreputable and successful of the “populars” is now to be master also of the principal “qualities".

On the strength of Murdoch’s assurances the unions concerned, both printers’ and journalists’, dropped whatever objections they may have had on these aspects.

From the start Murdoch made it quite clear that his priority is profit he had no intention of taking over the group on any other basis. He demanded that by February 12 the unions had to agree to reductions of staffing ranging from 9 per cent for journalists to 50 per cent in the composing room, with compulsory redundancies if necessary; a wage freeze until October 1982; and printing the supplements outside London. This, of course, was an opening gambit and he cannot have been surprised that the unions’ immediate reaction was to reject the lot.

The other big issue concerns unofficial lightening strikes. Newspapers are particularly vulnerable to such stoppages, which lead not only to loss of income from sales and from advertising, but also to advertisers permanently taking their publicity elsewhere. Murdoch asked for union guarantees of continuous production, with penalty clauses that unofficial strikes would lose their pay immediately and that from the second day other members of the same union would have their pay reduced to basic pay, as also would all printing workers from the third day.

The unions eventually agreed to give guarantees, but without the penalty clauses, and to some redundancies. They are carrying on parallel negotiations with the other national newspapers.

It is not only The Times group that is in difficulties financially. Most sections of the British printing and publicity industry have their problems, partly due to the depression, but also to competition from cheaper production abroad and a feared permanent decline in book sales. Many British companies now get their printing done outside this country. Cassels have given up their general list and the British Printing Corporation, faced with heavy losses and indebtedness to the banks, has come under the control of Robert Maxwell’s Pergamon Press. In the printing machine industry American and European markets are being invaded by the more modern and efficient products of a Japanese company.

So far the unions have been fairly successful in resisting new processes which mean loss of jobs, but in the long run they cannot escape capitalism’s inexorable law that companies which continue to make losses go out of business.

Edgar Hardcastle

Cooking the Books: Is Ian Paisley a socialist? (2007)

The Cooking The Books column from the March 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is not often that the business pages of the capitalist press refer to socialism. Past experience suggests that when they do they make fools of themselves. A recent article in the Times ( 9 January) by Tim Hames confirmed this. “Northern Ireland”, he wrote, “is in danger of replacing sectarianism with socialism”.

If only this were true. Unfortunately socialism (common ownership,democratic control, production for use not profit, distribution according to needs) is not on the agenda there and in any event couldn’t be since socialism cannot be established just in one country let alone one province.

But this is not what Hames had in mind. After pointing out that state spending represents 60 percent of all spending in Northern Ireland, he went on: “The Rev Paisley and Mr McGuinness will find little difficulty making common cause in asking for ever larger public spending to be showered, equitably, on their constituencies”.

While it is true that politics in Northern Ireland is characterised by what on the continent of Europe is known as “clientelism” – where different politicians appeal to a different group of identified “clients” on the basis of getting material benefits for them in particular – Hames is wrong in thinking government spending and subsidies on and for the poorer sections of society is socialism. If it did then the Reverend Inane Paisley, with his client basis of poor Protestants, would indeed be a socialist. An absurd conclusion which is proof that the original proposition is wrong in accordance with the principle of logic the Ancient Romans used to call reductio ad absurdum.

Government spending on measures to help the poor has nothing to do with socialism. That’s reformism not socialism. At most Paisley is a reformist, even a “leftwing” reformist compared with the UK Labour Party which used to take up this position (now it cuts back on benefits for the poor).

But if Paisley isn’t a socialist, what about President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela? He features on the business pages more than Paisley. Following his re-election as President in December, Chavez announced plans to (re-)nationalise telecom and power companies in Venezuela. Horrified, the Times (9 January) declared: “Mr Chavez begins his third termtomorrow, promising to complete what he calls  Venezuela’s Socialist Revolution of the 21st century”.

More people would find it easier to regard Chavez as a socialist than Paisley, but this is based on another misconception about socialism – that it means government ownership. If this was socialism then all sorts of people just as unlikely as Paisley would be socialists.

Capitalist governments everywhere, whatever their political colour, whether political dictatorships or political democracies, whether “rightwing” or leftwing”, have had recourse to nationalisation. Very early on socialists, basing themselves on the experience of Imperial Germany under Bismarck, identified this as state capitalism since with government ownership the workers remained exploited and bossed. The 70-year experience of Russia under the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks confirmed this, as did the experience of the nationalisations carried out by the postwar Labour government in Britain.

Nationalisation – government ownership of industry – is state capitalism because it leaves all the essential features of capitalism intact: production for sale with a view to profit, surplus value produced by wage worker, monetary calculation. Only the management changes, from private capitalists or their appointees to state bureaucrats.

Chavez’s renationalisation programme is no different. His “Socialist Revolution of the 21st Century” is the State Capitalism of the 20th Century all over again.

Editorial: The Peace Settlement : Back to 1815 or on to Socialism? (1941)

Editorial from the September 1941 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Times, in a recent editorial, was discussing the kind of settlement that should be made when the war is over. Comparison was made between the Versailles Peace Treaty made after the last war and the settlement made in 1815, when Napoleon’s armies had been disposed of, and the comparison was wholly in favour of 1815 !

 Neither ingenious formulas nor noble aspirations will of themselves suffice. Those who made the Vienna settlement of 1815 were less affected by sentiment and took less account of abstract ideals than the peace-makers of Versailles. But the settlement proved more enduring because it was based on a shrewder estimate of the relative strength of the principal European Powers. No peace settlement can last which is not rooted in the realities of power. Mr. Eden was right, in his speech last Tuesday, to set down as the first of peace requirements the military measures necessary “to prevent a repetition of Germany’s misdeeds.”— (Times, August 1st, 1941.)

Thus does the Capitalist world progress. During and after the last war the keynote of the utterances of most of the leaders of the Liberal and Labour Parties was that the mistakes of 1815 must not be repeated. Instead of a peace based on the balance of force we must have, they said, a peace based on principles and ideals. Now that it is popular in the same quarters to ascribe the present war to the last peace, there is a revulsion of feeling, and back we go to the good old principles of the reactionaries who disposed of the boundaries of Europe 126 years ago. And what will that mean?

One thing the Times does not attempt to hide is that even when the Peace is settled, trouble will still be round the corner.

  “The danger point is likely to occur not at the moment when the settlement is made, but some 15 to 20 years after . . . when a new generation rises to challenge it.”

Indeed, the Times need not have postponed the trouble for so long a period. In accordance with its newfound enthusiasm for 1815, the Times pointed out that after this war.

  “Leadership in Eastern Europe is essential if the disorganisation of the past 20 years is to be avoided … This leadership can fall only to Germany or to Russia.”

This line naturally caused some apprehension in the minds of the Governments of the smaller Powers, notably Turkey and Poland, especially in view of the Times’ further remark that “an enforced disruption of Germany would run athwart the modern trend towards larger and more integrated units, and would be unlikely to endure.”

The rulers of the smaller Powers anxious to preserve independence can see the difficulty of doing so whether Germany or Russia rules the roost in Eastern Europe.

Then, a few weeks later, came a Times report about the growth of a Pan-Slav movement in Russia: —

  “Hence to-day virtually the whole Russian nation— and, indeed, all the Soviet peoples—stand in conscious solidarity behind the Government. They believe that a greater Russia may arise, destined to be the nucleus of the Slav peoples, and to play the same unifying role as Prussia did in Germany.”—(Times, August 25th, 1941.)

What with the existing Empires and new Russian and Chinese Empires in process of formation, or at least being thought about, will the new world be any better than the old? Let there be no mistake about it, there is no formula or principle, new or old, Prussian or Russian, British or American, which will solve the nationality problems of Europe and the rest of the world under Capitalism. Capitalism breeds conflict, and conflict leads on to war even though a Napoleon gives place to a Kaiser or a Hitler.

A Fight to the Finish (1985)

Book Review from the November 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Strike, Sunday Times Insight Team. (Coronet Books £2.50)

This book is unlikely to find much favour among left wing activists, preoccupied as they are with weaving over the calamitous reality of the coal strike a blanket of myths:

• that it was all caused by the malevolent intent of Thatcher, MacGregor and the rest; 
• that Arthur Scargill was a saviour of the working class, crucified by the media;
• that the miners were struggling for "their" jobs and "their" communities:
• that the coal industry can and should be run for the benefit and comfort of the miners under a capitalist society;
• that it can all be put to rights by the election of another Labour government who will release the gaoled miners, repay the fines imposed by the courts, re-employ the sacked strikers, restore the union's sequestrated funds . . .

The British coal industry, which in its heyday contributed so much to the profits of the capitalist class, has been in continuous decline since the First World War. In 1913 there were 3.000 working pits producing some 300m tonnes a year; when the industry was nationalised in 1947 there were under one thousand turning out 200m tonnes a year. Even so, the industry in 1947 supplied about 90 per cent of the primary energy requirements in Britain. One plan after another — none of them having much basis in reality — promised heavier investment, busier pits, higher production. more secure jobs. At times — for example in the oil crisis of 1973/4 — the optimism was tinged with hysteria. In the event, the plans were undermined by competition from other energy sources, notably oil and natural gas and by 1974 coal was filling barely one third of the total fuel market in Britain. The profitability of individual pits came under the accountants' scrutiny and many of those which weighed in the wrong side of the balance sheet were closed. This happened under Labour governments as well as under the Tories and when Heath's 1970 victory threw out the Wilson government there were less than 300 active pits.

To begin with, the closures — in spite of the dramatic changes they wrought, for example in the Rhondda which was left with only one pit — were accomplished with little opposition. British capitalism at large was still booming enough to provide plenty of other jobs to miners who were offered seductive redundancy terms. In general the NUM co-operated quietly under a succession of leaders who liked to think they were craftily applying the politics of the possible. But as the slump deepened the miners' resistance to redundancy. to uprooting themselves and their families, stiffened. In 1981, by an emphatic majority, they elected as their president, the much loved, much hated Arthur Scargill.

The new NUM President had been prominent in — perhaps largely responsible for — the miners' victories in 1972 and 1974 and he appeared to be obsessed by, and to have learned nothing from, the experiences. It is difficult to explain his policies and actions other than through a resolve to engage the government in a titanic, no-compromise fight to the finish, at whatever cost. But if the government had been defeated in the 1970s. and had beat an apparently humiliating retreat over closures in 1981, by 1984 they were ready for a war of attrition with whichever trade union was prepared to go over the top. Nicholas Ridley, now Minister for Transport, contributed importantly to the government's strategy and there could have been few more obvious choices for the new Chairman of the NCB than Ian MacGregor (who had first been approached, as a prospective hatchet man for British Leyland. by a Labour Industry Secretary). MacGregor later described the strike as a poker game, in which the first one to blink was the loser: 'I don't intend to blink".

Thereafter, the government's tactics could hardly be faulted. Most vitally they kept the power stations supplied with coal by using small, non-union road transport firms and by importing coal through minor ports like Flixborough. Thus an exceptionally severe winter was survived without any power cuts. They hastily appeased other strikes — in the docks and by the pit deputies — which posed a crucial threat to their strategy. Any possible sympathy among other important unions was diverted with a propaganda campaign which emphasised the comparatively large redundancy payments on offer to the miners. They consistently harped on the NUM's refusal to hold a ballot, which was Scargill's most damaging mistake. Finally, the whole policy was asserted by a massive, massively organised, police presence which did not baulk at breaking the law in order to frustrate the pickets.

Against that the miners could oppose their courage, their ingenuity, their tradition of militancy — and Scargill's empty rhetoric. Unity they could not offer, for Scargill's refusal to hold a ballot had prevented that. As the going got tougher Scargill tried to conceal reality beneath bluster and with claims of an imminent victory, reminiscent of Hitler's last days in the Berlin bunker. The time came when with each day out the miners' resolve was bound to weaken. The NCB response to this was to harden its face, refusing Scargill's desperate appeal to return to a settlement which he had earlier refused. Perhaps the breaking point came at Christmas, when the miners' poignant celebrations were followed by a sickening sense of anti-climax. There was little else for them to do but surrender. leaving the NUM and the rest of the union movement with little strength to resist the employers' onslaughts.

This is not to say that all was well on the other side of the barricades, where MacGregor was a disaster in the cynical, slippery game of ruling class propaganda. At times the divisions in the NCB management were almost as marked as those in the NUM. What counted in the end. above the influences of any personalities, were the basic facts that coal is a commodity — produced for sale and profit — and that the endurance of workers on strike is limited by their inability to survive without an income. As happened in 1926. the miners were really starved into submission.

Strike is a compact, informative account of that year of conflict but its sympathies show through. Andrew Neil, editor of the Sunday Times, introduces the book with glowing praise as ". . . impartial and well-informed . . . accurate . .. scoop of the year. . ." while assuring us that the Insight team work independently of the paper's editorial policy, which is " . . for the sake of liberal democracy, economic recovery and the rolling back of union power''. Perhaps that is why Strike, so illuminating on some issues, gives so little attention to the savage behaviour of the police and to their other illegal policies, such as the obstruction of public thoroughfares, which have such serious implications for political and trade union activity. It is similarly scant about the stoicism and courage of the miners and their families in sustaining so long and bitter a struggle.

This is not a comfortable book for left wingers because of the lessons which can be drawn from it by the class conscious. Workers have no "right" to their jobs; they are employed only on the prospect that their labour will yield profit to the capitalists. In a class divided society conflict is inevitable but in this the strike should be a weapon of last resort, not the plaything of a leader. Strikes should proceed on a democratic decision and ideally should be brief as well as concentrated. It is vital to separate the struggles on the industrial field, which are about the division of wealth under capitalism, from that on the political field, which is concerned with the revolution to dispossess the capitalists of their monopoly of the means of life. It is on the political field, and not the industrial, that the working class is able to contest with the state, to control it for their own emancipation.

For the workers to ignore these lessons is futile and dangerous. History is a guide for future action and that of the coal strike points unwaveringly to the urgent need for a new social system.

Ivan

Print unions fight for survival (1986)

From the March 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Not for the first time The Times newspaper is at the centre of a bitter industrial dispute. In November 1978 Lord Thomson, then owner of the paper, decided that he was no longer willing to run it at a loss. He demanded from the unions agreement to accept new printing technology, the elimination of “unofficial" strikes and a big reduction of staff. Failing to get agreement he locked out the workers and The Times was off the streets for nearly a year. When work was resumed it was on terms far short of what Thomson wanted and two years later he pulled out and sold to Rupert Murdoch. In January 1986 Murdoch took the printing of his papers, The Times, Sunday Times, Sun and News of the World out of Fleet Street to his new plants at Wapping and Glasgow.

At Wapping printing is being carried on by 500 workers belonging to the electrical workers' union and the print unions, in place of the former 5,000 members of the print unions, all of whom were sacked when they came out on strike. Murdoch admitted that the changes had not been fully effective. There was a fall in the number of copies printed and considerable difficulty arose over distribution, in spite of the fact that in London it was taken over by a new fleet of vans. Murdoch said he was confident that all the difficulties would be overcome in a few weeks. Print union officials said it was only the beginning of a struggle which could go on for months.

Much had happened since 1978 to change the position of the unions and the management, including the building of the Wapping plant at a cost of £100 million of which £7 million was spent on American computer equipment. The law governing strikes and picketing had been tightened by the Thatcher government, and the print unions had already been defeated in their resistance to the use of the new technology by Eddy Shah, who is publishing a new paper in March without employing members of those unions. Conflict with the law in that battle had already cost the National Graphical Association heavily. The Financial Times (27 December 1985) estimated that the cost, including further court claims still pending, may reach £2.000,000.

A similar struggle over new technology was going on at the same time between the print unions and other newspaper proprietors including Robert Maxwell, owner of the Mirror group of papers. That dispute was settled by agreement with the unions, which led Maxwell to say rude things in the Mirror (27 January) about his rival. Whereas, said Maxwell, he had followed ‘The British Way" of negotiating with the unions. Rupert Murdoch, importing brutal tactics from Australia and America, "prefers to destroy them". Lest it be thought that "The British Way" differs essentially in its purpose from the Murdoch way. it should be noted that the Mirror has also got rid of 2.000 printers, "most by early retirement or voluntary redundancy".

At the time of writing it is not possible to know with certainty what will be the outcome of the dispute but the prospects for the unions look extremely bleak. They were counting on the help of the TUC and other unions, but already most of the journalists, though against the instructions of their own union, have accepted Murdoch's terms. The printers are hoping that the Transport and General Workers' Union will succeed in blacking the distribution of Murdoch s papers and that the TUC will condemn and possibly expel the Electrical Workers' Union, which however shows no sign at present of obeying TUC instructions. Many transport workers too, are ignoring the instructions of their union not to carry Murdoch's papers.

Basically what the struggle is all about is the ceaseless development of new techniques as a feature of capitalism in the search for cheaper methods of production. The capitalists who adopt the new and cheaper methods capture the market. Those who fail to do so go out of business, as has happened with several newspapers and threatens others. There have been many such developments in the history of printing: from the hand compositor setting individual letters, to the keyboard monotype and linotype and latterly to the new system which enables journalists to print the final product without the involvement of compositors. The writing on the wall for the London newspapers is the claim by Eddy Shah that he will be able to sell his newspapers at less than half the price of existing papers. The whole newspaper industry has to adopt the new technology or face bankruptcy, because the advertisers' money will flow to the cheaper journals.

Workers in every occupation have always been affected by this aspect of capitalism. The railways almost destroyed the canal companies and horse transport, only to be hit themselves by motor and air transport. Sailing ships were replaced by coal fired steamships and then by oil burning ships. The inland telegraph service has gone. There has been an enormous reduction in the numbers of coal miners and farm workers. Along with having to meet competition from oil, gas and nuclear power the coal industry has seen a change which replaces men in the pits by workers in other industries. Before the newly opened Selby pit produced a single ton of coal, £1,000 million had been spent on new coal cutting machines and other appliances. In agriculture the old. nearly self-sufficient farms have been replaced by those dependent on a vast input of fertilisers, weed-killers and pesticides from the chemical industry. Jobs on farms have been replaced by jobs in the chemical industry.

The trade unions, in seeking to protect their members' jobs, have had to make a hard choice. They can hope to delay the introduction of the new techniques and can often do so, as have the Fleet Street printers, but at the end of the road they either have to negotiate a reduction of jobs, as on Maxwell's Mirror, or risk losing all the jobs as on Murdoch's Times group of papers.

The stock argument of capitalist economists has always been that workers should not resist the new techniques but welcome them on the ground that if the price of the product is reduced its market will expand and there will be more, not fewer, jobs. In a limited way this is sometimes true. Following the publication of the Daily Mail in 1896. and other cheaper papers with wider circulations the numbers of workers employed in the printing and paper trades continued to increase. And it is reported from America (Sunday Times 19 January) that a similar development has taken place there, following the use of new technology.

  The new technology revolution in American newspapers has brought increased circulations. a wider range of publications, and an increase in newspaper jobs — in spite of reduced manning in the composing rooms.

The increase of other jobs is of course no cause for gratification to the compositors whose jobs have gone. In general, technical developments hit hardest at older workers, unable to adapt to the new requirements.

And the argument of the capitalist economists ignores the fact that not only is capitalism always creating some unemployment but periodically it rises to peak levels, as at present and the parties of capitalism can do absolutely nothing to prevent it.

Edgar Hardcastle

A Citizen of the World (1976)

From the Summer 1976 issue of The Western Socialist

Mr. Gilbert McClatchie, author and lecturer on Socialist theory, died in London on Tuesday at the age of 87. For over 30 years editor of the Socialist Standard, he was an authority on the historical basis of Marxism. His latest work, Historical Materialism, was published in 1975 by The Socialist Party of Great Britain. He was also the author of The Communist Manifesto and the Last 100 Years, which was written in 1948 on the one-hundredth anniversary of the original, and is now a collectors’ item.

For many years he ran a bookshop behind Baker Street and he accumulated what is probably the only comprehensive private library in the United Kingdom of eighteenth and nineteenth century works on political economy and sociology. Even at the age of 80 he was still lecturing throughout America and Canada. He was a critic of certain aspects of Marxian theory and was anything but an unquestioning disciple. The SPGB, which he joined in 1910, nominated him as parliamentary candidate for Paddington North in the 1950s.

He was an Irishman, but a severe critic and opponent of the Irish Nationalists of the 1916 Easter period, with whom he was on personal terms, including James Connolly and most of the old members of Sinn Fein. A man of mild temper, infinite patience and intellectual integrity, he was the exact opposite of what passes these days as a revolutionary. His contribution to an understanding of the contemporary problems facing society was useful and will endure.

Reprint of news item from the London Times.

The Times Lockout (1979)

From the January 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

When The Times and Sunday Times suspended publication on 30 November, the owners had given all the unions involved a time limit to accept a new and wide-ranging agreement, while the National Graphical Association, the union whose members stood to lose most by the new printing methods, was refusing to negotiate at all “under duress”. Fears were expressed that the papers might disappear like the News Chronicle, Daily Herald and Star. Indeed, the General Secretary of the NGA declared: -

It appears that Lord Thomson and The Times are determined to act as executioners in the killing of The Times and Sunday Times. We are to be cast in the role of undertakers—which leaves us with no alternative but to bury it. (Daily Mail, 5th December 1978)

But this last ditch declaration did not reflect the realities of the situation, which pointed to the employers’ aggressive action securing for them the substance of their demands while conceding something to the NGA, as has happened in the resumed negotiations.

The dispute attracted quite exceptional publicity, suggesting that it was one entirely without precedent. Apart from the claim that The Times itself is something special, there was nothing in this, for the dispute did not involve anything that has not happened before. It was just the old familiar ugly face of capitalism.

Lockouts are as old as capitalism, including those aimed at forcing unions to accept new production techniques; like the great engineering lockout of 1897. Lord Thompson’s stand is just the same as that of the then engineering employers with their declaration “we will be masters in all our shops”.

Every generation has seen workers who had acquired high skills robbed of their jobs and livelihood through the development of new techniques: the hand-loom weavers ruined by power-driven factory textiles, the canal boatmen and the drivers of horse-drawn vehicles driven out by the railways; the morse telegraphist hit by machine telegraphy and the telephone, the railwaymen in their turn squeezed out by motor transport. Printing itself had the problem of manual typesetting displaced by the steam press, the rotary press and the linotype machine.

In its defence The Times says that it offered relatively generous redundancy pay and that all redundancies will be voluntary; but this only meets part of the workers’ problems. Men with specialised skills who have worked at them for years and have taken pride in their work lose what, to many of them, has come to be regarded as a way of life. Even if they get, and like, another sort of job — and many cannot hope to do so — it is likely to be at lower pay.

All of this has happened many times before. What shocked journalists and printers on The Times was that it should happen to them; some even thought that Lord Thompson was bluffing.

The technical developments behind the dispute concern the new computerised process which enables those who use the keyboards to set the type directly, thus eliminating the old type-setting by the printers. The National Graphical Association said they accepted the new methods but demanded that all, or most, of the keyboard work should be done by their retrained members. According to the Observer (3 December 1978) the NGA was prepared to allow a limited amount of the work to go to clerks handling advertisments, but wanted the practice of journalists directly type-setting some of their own articles to be deferred for five years. A complication is that some of the journalists want to take over the work from the NGA members; one of them is reported to have described the NGA claim as being like a claim that “horse-drivers should be the only people driving cars with combustion engines”.

In a lengthy statement The Times (24 November) set out what the owners regarded as the three main issues. The first related to the increasing number of unofficial strikes which have interrupted production. The Times demanded a return to the situation as it existed before the early 1960s, when the union executives were able to exercise control over their members and prevent unofficial walkouts. This is what The Times means when it says it wants to deal with “strong Trade Unions”.

The second issue named in this article was the new technique. “The electronic process is more efficient, more flexible, cleaner and much less expensive”. Unless it is adopted, says The Times, they cannot compete with their rivals and cannot make adequate profit. The third issue flows from the greater efficiency of the new method, in the form of greater productivity and consequent big reductions of staff — with the promise of higher pay for those who keep their jobs.

It was in this situation that Times Newspapers decided to shut down unless the unions would accept the new agreement by 30 November, with the implied threat (in spite of Lord Thompson’s denial of any such intention) that in the last resort the suspension would become permanent. There was to be no repetition of the action of the late Lord Thompson, who met a £3 million loss out of the family fortune. So the owners were prepared to lose much more than £3 million in order to coerce the unions. An important factor in the struggle was that they were financially able to stand a long struggle. It was reported in the Observer (3 December 1978).

The International Thompson Organisation, run by Lord Thompson from its base in Toronto, is expecting to declare £45 million after-tax profit this year. Most of that comes from North Sea oilfields which will soon reach peak production.

Publishing The Times is only a small part of their activity: if need be they could give it up altogether.

Two incidents early in the dispute deserve comment as illustrating the naive attitude of some workers towards capitalism. The General Secretary of the NGA appealed to Lord Thomson to negotiate over the heads of the management, a request that was refused. And The Times correspondent, Mr. Clifford Langley, in a letter to the Guardian (4 December 1978) deplored the action of the management and of the editor “who has allowed his staff . . .  to be exposed to the intolerable threat of dismissal, against an impossible deadline”. He said that the staff had “lost all confidence in the management” and called on the editor to resign in protest at the management’s attitude.

What makes the NGA General Secretary and Mr. Langley think that “the management” and the editor have some sort of independent authority? The Management is there to carry out the owners’ policy and if the editor refused he would be sacked like any other employee. This is capitalism; in The Times as in any other organisation run for profit.

And what is there in the belief that The Times is in some ways special? It rests on the claim that the newspaper has a high standard of objective reporting, allows critics access to its columns and puts the wellbeing of “the people” before party advantage and private profit. There is something in the first two points — after all, the ruling class have needed to know what is really going on in the world — and that newspaper is one of the few which has, on rare occasions, allowed us space to put our case in our own words. But the present dispute shows how ruthless they can be when their own capitalist interest is at stake.

Edgar Hardcastle

Overproduction Baffles the Capitalists. (1931)

From the December 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The Times" on September 5th, had an editorial on the present world economic situation that was strangely frank and illuminating, as the following extracts will show:—

   How disastrously the financial machinery of the world is out of gear was strikingly illustrated the other day, when, in order to effect an exchange of commodities, the Brazilian Government and the Federal Farm Board of the United States had to resort to the primitive method of direct barter. They signed an agreement exchanging 1,050,000 bags of coffee for 25,000,000 bushels of wheat. That method of meeting the situation is, at any rate., better than some of those which have been adopted. In Texas and Oklahoma the military took charge of the oil wells, not to prevent any interference with production, but to stop production, and in Kansas orders were given to stop production in specified areas  . . .
    The cotton growers of the Southern States were recently urged by the Federal Farm Board to destroy one-third of their crops, and, though they indignantly rejected this suggestion, they themselves are seriously considering proposals to prohibit the growing, gathering or ginning of cotton next year. In Brazil hundreds of thousands of bags of coffee have been draught and destroyed by the Coffee States Council.  . . .
     Every one knows that there is over-production in the sense that there is more cotton, more wheat, more sugar, more coffee, and, apparently, more of every kind of food and raw material on the market than the consumer is able to buy at prices remunerative to the grower. . . .
    Over-production is hard to imagine in the sense that more wheat, for example, is being grown than the world can use. At any rate it cannot be said to exist so long as there are people who cannot get enough bread to eat.  . . .
    Half a dozen professors of political economy, discussing the practical questions on which their studies should enable them to throw light, can disagree among themselves as wholeheartedly as any half a dozen business men in a railway carriage. But somehow or other, with or without the aid of the scientific economist, answers will have to be found for the economic riddles over which the world is now bewildered. Until they are solved, or, perhaps, solve themselves, there can be no general return to prosperity.

Detailed comment would spoil this picture.

Too much of everything, but we are poor because we can’t buy! America can’t sell so she takes to barter. The owners in the producing industries have taken fright and are destroying or restricting production! The sum total of opinion in Tory, Liberal, Labour and T.U.C. camps is that the only way out for this country is a general cut in wages or an increase in prices—a reduction in buying power! Under it all is the hope, frankly expressed above, that somehow or other things will straighten themselves out.

The capitalists, their guides and scribes, are impotent in the face of productive machinery so prolific that the wealth turned out is clogging and weighing the system down. The only real answer they have is to find a means, satisfactory to the bulk of their class, for restricting production and parcelling out markets.

Gilmac.

Running Commentary: Times past? (1980)

The Running Commentary column from the December 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Times past?

It was bad enough Lord Matthews laying the Evening News to rest but the possibility of closing down The Times was a threat to this thing called the British Way of Life nearly as grave as Tony Benn’s daft promise to create a thousand Labour peers.

Without “the Thunderer” the clubs of Pall Mall and the better class breakfast tables throughout the land would never be the same again. Little wonder that there was such agonising; the gutters of Fleet Street ran deep with the bibulous tears of potentially redundant hacks.

The Times, set concrete hard in smug self-esteem, could hardly have been expected to appreciate a certain irony about its plight. As a world famous pillar of support for capitalism, it has sounded some of its loudest thunder in defence of the system’s basic principle by which production depends on the chances of a profit being made.

The great newspaper itself is now caught in the net of this inexorable demand of property society no profit, no production. For years The Times has been published at a massive loss which has been smoothed over partly by profits from other parts of the parent group and partly by the Thompson family’s private wealth.

Now that the bleeding has to stop, The Times—and its nervous sisters in Fleet Street are predictably laying the blame on allegedly greedy and irresponsible workers. Of course if those workers had been prepared to work twenty-four hours a day without eating they could have gone without wages and The Times would have been profitable enough to satisfy even the Thompsons.

For the Thompson Organisation to blame workers who press wage claims which might be unwisely timed is as irrelevant as workers who become redundant blaming incompetent management. In these matters the capitalist system is the culprit and in asserting its profit prioritites it does not discriminate not even in favour of its most ardent supporters.

Fallen star

Even more shattering that the possible loss of The Times was the actual death by suicide of Lady Isobel Barnett whose famous charm, wit and intelligence earned her the admiration and gratitude of countless television-addicted workers throughout the land and so also contributed to the enrichment of this British Way of Life.

The downfall of so glittering a star

(who was also rich, which is often calculated to win the admiration and gratitude etc. etc. . .) was bound to provoke a flood of sorrow. There were many hints that it was somehow indecent to have prosecuted her for shoplifting and some questioning about the whole of this practice. (Shoplifting, when all is said and done, is outlawed by capitalism as theft; many shops display brusque notices “Thieves Will Be Prosecuted”.)

The offence is most typically committed by females who are under acute emotional and financial pressure single mothers struggling to feed and bring up a family on the laughable benefits of Social Security, elderly women who, because their children have grown up and left home and they are no longer readily employable, fear that their useful life is at an end.

Lady Barnett did not come into that category. The Daily Telegraph, which customarily has little sympathy for “public figures” who fall from grace, was unkind enough to indicate that she was an habitual, compulsive shoplifter, someone who may have been classifiable as needing treatment to programme her into conformity with capitalism’s property laws.

Except that she should not have needed that. She was, after all, once a magistrate who sat in judgement on others who had broken those laws. On this point, she seemed to have suffered some confusion; in the dock herself, she chose trial by jury rather than trust her fate to the local bench in which she might have been expected to have more confidence.

The point will not be lost on the sort of people Lady Barnett once dispensed the “justice” of capitalism to—the wretched, frightened, confused workers who, having broken capitalism’s law, are daily paraded through the courts and, having tremblingly accepted their punishment, are forgotten. Unlike Lady Barnett.

Turning the screw

Whose heart did not bleed for his shareholders, when Lord Matthews appeared on television to insist that, unless the Cunard seamen agreed to the line registering two of their ships under a flag of convenience, the company would sell the ships—and eventually even the QE2 as well.

Matthews argued that this was unavoidable because the ships could pay their way only by employing the cheaper workforce available under a flag of convenience one way of tapping an international pool of labour in order to bring down wages. Under this pressure the seamen accepted what Matthews, in his genial way, described as a “good old British compromise” and agreed that one of the ships would be registered.

On shore, workers in British Leyland did not have even a compromise open to them when they tried to resist the company’s 6.8 per cent pay offer. In yet another episode in their long retreat before the onslaught on their conditions by the Edwardes management, they accepted the terms. Had they resisted, the company was promising to shut down within 48 hours.

The Ford Motor Company, whose recent publicity campaign urged buyers to “share in our successes”, is in process of imposing a new code of discipline on their workers which will involve the sacking of strikers and the suspension without pay (which is not sacking) of anyone who refuses to do a striker’s work.

And over all this looms the government’s determination to keep essential workers like firemen and hospital staff and water and sewage workers to a 6 per cent rise — that is, to impose a severe cut in their living standards.

That the screw can be tightened on the workers in this way is a grim symptom of the deepening slump in world capitalism. Mounting unemployment is remorselessly undermining the workers’ bargaining strength, depriving them of many of their weapons in the struggle to maintain their standards and so leading to further turns of the screw.

The immediate future for the working class is grim. It promises that the class division of capitalism, with its unending strife, its disruption and its wastefulness, will never be more clearly, nor more harshly exposed.